HBO's Bored to Death finds inspiration in New York's famous journalists

By JEREMY W. PETERS, NEW YORK TIMES

November 4, 2011Updated: November 4, 2011 6:21pm

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Jonathan Ames, author and creator of the cable television series "Bored to Death," at the BookCourt in New York, Oct. 13, 2010. Ames is famous now, and not just in the quirky, artist-filled coffee shops and bars of brownstone Brooklyn, which serve as the setting for much of his writing as well as his HBO series now in its second season. (Deidre Schoo/The New York Times) less

Jonathan Ames, author and creator of the cable television series "Bored to Death," at the BookCourt in New York, Oct. 13, 2010. Ames is famous now, and not just in the quirky, artist-filled coffee shops and ... more

Photo: DEIDRE SCHOO

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Jonathan Ames, author and creator of the cable television series "Bored to Death," at the BookCourt in New York, Oct. 13, 2010. Ames is famous now, and not just in the quirky, artist-filled coffee shops and bars of brownstone Brooklyn, which serve as the setting for much of his writing as well as his HBO series now in its second season. (Deidre Schoo/The New York Times) less

Jonathan Ames, author and creator of the cable television series "Bored to Death," at the BookCourt in New York, Oct. 13, 2010. Ames is famous now, and not just in the quirky, artist-filled coffee shops and ... more

Photo: DEIDRE SCHOO

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DEIDRE SCHOO : NEW YORK TIMES

DEIDRE SCHOO : NEW YORK TIMES

Photo: DEIDRE SCHOO

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MICHAEL NAGLE : NEW YORK TIMES
inspiration: Ted Danson plays George Christopher on HBO's comedy series Bored to Death, a character that is an amalgam of legendary New York journalists.

MICHAEL NAGLE : NEW YORK TIMES
inspiration: Ted Danson plays George Christopher on HBO's comedy series Bored to Death, a character that is an amalgam of legendary New York journalists.

Photo: MICHAEL NAGLE

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FILE -- American writer George Plimpton at his apartment in New York, June 13, 1987. Jonathan Ames, the creator of the show "Bored to Death," on HBO found a model for his character George Christopher in Plimpton. (Eddie Hausner/The New York Times) less

FILE -- American writer George Plimpton at his apartment in New York, June 13, 1987. Jonathan Ames, the creator of the show "Bored to Death," on HBO found a model for his character George Christopher in ... more

Photo: EDDIE HAUSNER

HBO's Bored to Death finds inspiration in New York's famous journalists

George Christopher, the hapless sage played by Ted Danson in the HBO comedy detective series, Bored to Death, was conceived as an amalgam of legendary New York journalists. And this season, when George opened a fashionable downtown restaurant, it was a move reminiscent of Graydon Carter (as are his initials).

The journalist as the urbane sophisticate - immortalized by real-life characters such as Truman Capote and fictional ones like Tess Harding, played by Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year - has faded as the fortunes of the profession have declined. But in George Christopher, it is alive and well.

Jonathan Ames, the show's creator, did not just sketch George's persona from the likes of famous journalists. He modeled George's clothes after studying pictures of Gay Talese's colorful wardrobe. He drew inspiration for plots from news about the Manhattan media. And he infused the script with references to the state of print publishing.

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"I'm not even reading anymore," George, who edited a fictional magazine named Edition in the first two seasons, said in one episode. "I got a Kindle, but I dropped it in the tub."

The Graydon Carter thread came to Ames as he was thinking about what George should do after he loses his job. "I thought maybe he'll start a Huffington Post or something," he said. "But I wanted a new direction, so I said, 'He'll open a restaurant like Graydon Carter.' "

The restaurant on the show, which Ames devilishly named "George on Jane," a nod to the character's womanizing ways, is supposed to be in the West Village, a la Carter's Waverly Inn. To come up with ideas for the set, Ames took the production designer to a meal there one night. That inspired the murals seen on the show, which are modeled after Edward Sorel's paintings at the Waverly.

Carter said that when he saw the paintings on television, he instantly knew what inspired them. So did Sorel.

"I got an email from Ed Sorel and he said: 'Some TV show is using our mural. We've got to sue them!'" Carter said with a chuckle. "I said, 'No, no, no.' "

Initially, Ames said in an interview, the concept for George was a Plimpton-esque figure, as the first name suggests. Plimpton's misadventures and boozy man-about-town image as editor of the Paris Review seemed the perfect inspiration.

The two knew each other casually when Plimpton was alive, enough to joke that they were lost relatives. (Plimpton's middle name was Ames.)

"George took a shine to me," Ames said, tugging on his bushy reddish-gray beard. At one point Plimpton asked if he was a descendant of the Ames of Boston. The thought of this made Ames, who is Jewish, chuckle. "I thought, there was no way I'm related to this WASP god."

But Ames also wanted to give George a sagelike quality. And after a long, prosecco-fueled evening with Hitchens in Italy in 2007, Ames found his second inspiration.

"He was so garrulous and charming," Ames recalled. "And I thought this kind of world-weary, romantic, hard-drinking, wise rascal needs to be on TV. So I fused the two, and it became George Christopher."

As luck would have it, Danson had read a biography about Plimpton before he was cast. "I think George Christopher is an extravagant character," he said. "And so was George Plimpton. Reading that really helped."

Danson said that about the closest he had come to the publishing world was last year when he was trying to sell his book about oceans, titled Oceana, published by Rodale Books. "I had a book agent and we went around pushing it to - what do you call them - publishing houses. I had all these lunches at places where I'd be sitting next to Dick Cavett. I got to nibble at that literary world," he said. "Very exciting. And different."